Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Some
writers are referred to as "a writer's writer," a designation that
suggests they are mainly appreciated by other writers—not bad if you treasure
the approval of your fellow writers, but not so good if you want to sell your
work to a larger audience than other writers--although given the burgeoning of
MFA programs, the audience of writers and wannabe writers seems to be growing.

The
short story writer, who used to be thought of as a money grubbing hack of the
sub-literary pulp and slick paper world, is now—if he or she is any good--more
often thought of as "a writers' writer" than novelists. Why is that
generally true? Alice Munro is often
called a "writer's writer."
And indeed, if you read the reviews of her work by other writers, you know
that other writers are almost universally rhapsodic about her short stories. Why
is that specifically true of Munro?

As
a side note: I did read a recent interview with Joy Williams (a writer I admire
a great deal) in The Paris Review, Summer
2014, in which Williams was more than a little snide about Munro. The
interviewer asked Williams if she enjoyed writing, and here is her answer:

That nice Canadian writer who recently won the
Nobel—beloved, admired, prolific. Who would deny it? She said she had a
“hellish good time” writing. This could be a subject for many, many panels. Get
a herd of writers together and ask them, Do you have a hellish good time
writing? Mostly, I believe, the answer would be no. But their going on about it
could take some time.

I am
disappointed with Williams' condescending reference to Munro as merely a
"nice Canadian writer." But, to continue this aside for a moment,
Williams did say something interesting in response to the interviewer's
inevitable question—"Can you define a short story?"—a response with
which she and "that nice Canadian wrier" would definitely agree. Here it is:

What a story is, is devious.
It pretends transparency, forthrightness. It engages with ordinary people,
ordinary matters, recognizable stuff. But this is all a masquerade. What good
stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibility of time, the dark
encroachment of old catastrophes—which is Wallace Stevens, I think. As a form,
the short story is hardly divine, though all excellent art has its mystery, its
spiritual rhythm. I think one should be able to do a lot in less than twenty
pages. I read a story recently about a woman who’d been on the lam and her
husband dies and she ends up getting in her pickup and driving away at the end,
and it was all about fracking, damage, dust to the communities, people selling
out for fifty thousand dollars. It was soboring.

(Williams
echoes Frank O'Connor's "Lonely Voice" theme in the interview,
affirming her belief that "what the short story, as a form, excels in is
the depiction of solitude and isolation." Munro would agree with this
also. So, of course, do I, which is why
I named my most recent book "I Am Your Brother.")

But
back to this issue of the short story writer in general and Alice Munro in
particular as a "writer's writer."
I have talked about this in some detail in an presentation I made at
Angers, France a few years ago and which has appeared in Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, Vol. 2, 2012, under the title
"Why Many Writers Like Short Stories and Many Readers Do Not." Because of possible copyright violations, I
will not reprint that article on this blog, but can give you an idea about its
content with the following quote:

It
should not be a surprise that several authors anointed with that kiss-of-death
designation, “writer’s writer”—Alice Munro, William Trevor, Deborah Eisenberg,
Joy Williams, Steven Millhauser, David Means—are primarily short story
writers. And it should also not be a
surprise that Francine Prose’s bravely titled 2006 book—Reading Like a
Writer—devoted much more space to analyzing and praising the writing of
short story authors than it did the writing of novelists.

I
have always argued that the short story is a unique literary form that makes
different demands on readers than its big-shouldered brother, the novel. However, often, the only readers I have found
who agree with me are writers of the short story. So I herewith call them to my
aid. I have rummaged through fifty years
of notes and have read hundreds of author interviews, introductions, and
commentaries to gather the judgments of 100 different authors on the short
story. I have organized these judgments into several major categories that may
prove helpful to our understanding of the short story. It is remarkable how much in agreement the
judgments of these one hundred authors are, and surprising that no one has ever
gathered them together before and tried to derive some general conclusions from
them.

In the
essay, I discuss a number of reasons why short story writers are often referred
to as "a writer's writer." But
one of the most obvious reasons that Alice Munro is so designated is she often
writes stories about women who write short stories. It may be that this is one of the reasons
that so many reviewers of Hateship,
Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage who are writers themselves have
singled out "Family Furnishings" as their favorite story in the
collection.

In
what follows, I will note some of the aspects of the story that might identify
it as a "writer's writer" story.

The
introit for this story focuses on a particular day in the life of the
narrator's father and his first cousin Alfrida who as children lived on
adjoining farms—the day when World War I ended. The seemingly trivial event on
this momentous day is the two children stomping on the ice in the furrows of the
field and enjoying its crackle. When Alfrida tells this story, the father says
she could not remember a thing like that and is making it up, which Alfrida
denies. The introit introduces the theme
that the story later develops—whether a story is about something remembered or
something invented—for when an event or a character is transformed into a story
event or character, it always seems invention rather than recollection.

The
first part of the story recounts the female narrator's recollections of Alfrida
and her effect on her family. Alfrida
writes a column for the local newspaper as well as responses to letters to the
paper. From the narrator's perspective
as a teenager, Alfrida is a sophisticated city person and has the ability to
transform her rural family with her intelligence and wit. The narrator wants to
escape her rural life for city sophistication, which she identifies later with
her in-laws, who seem to live in a "world of storybook privilege." To
the adolescent narrator, Alfrida represents a "liberated" woman,
whose opinion is as valued as that of the men, although she sometimes seems to
be putting on a show. She regales the
narrator with stories of people and events that the narrator has bound hints of
in her reading, "but felt giddy to hear about, even at third or fourth
hand, in real life."

One of the key
issues here has to do with what seems most real to the writer—the stuff of
writing or the stuff of the everyday. When asked if "Family
Furnishings" was based on life, she says no, but when she was young
writing was so important she would sacrifice anything for it. "Because I thought of the world in which
I wrote—the world I created—as somehow much more enormously alive than the
world I was actually living in."
Alive in what way? Alive in the
way Chekhov says life in stories is alive, not the experiential world but the
aesthetic world.

However,
the one point on which the narrator's parents and Alfrida diverge is their
attitude about sex. When Alfrida asks if
she can bring her male friend to visit, she is refused. The narrator says her mother has a horror of
"irregular sex or flaunted sex—of any sex, you might say, for the proper
married kind was not acknowledged at all."

When
the narrator wins a scholarship and goes to school in the city where Alfrida
lives (Ottawa, Ontario), Alfrida invites her to visit, but she ignores the
invitation and does not want to bring any of her friends to meet Alfrida, for
she now understands that Alfrida is not so sophisticated and knows she would
scorn the foreign films and literary novels that she and her friends read, for
she has always referred to the narrator's father's classic novels as "hotshot
reading." The narrator's father
pretends to agree with Alfrida about such things, even though he does read the
books that Alfrida scorns. The narrator,
who wants to become a writer, says she does not want to show such contempt for
things that matter to her, and that in order to not have to do that she would
have to avoid those people she used to know, such as Alfrida, who has now lost
all importance in her life.

When
she does finally decide to go visit Alfrida, she is even more aware of the fact
that Alfrida is not the sophisticated woman of the world that she once thought
she was. During the visit, Alfrida talks about her mother, who died when a coal
oil lamp exploded in her hands. The narrator talks a great deal about this
story, especially how her aunts and her mother felt about it, seeing it as a
"horrible treasure to them, something our family could claim that nobody
else could, a distinction that would never be let go. To listen to them had always made me feel as
if there was some obscene connivance going on, a fond fingering of whatever was
grisly or disastrous. Their voices were
like worms slithering around in my insides." (The story as treasure is
interesting to me, for it seems to suggest that the writer perceives the value
of significance in events that nonreaders do not.)

She
is glad her fiancé did not come on the visit, for he would not have wanted to
hear about Alfrida's mother's death.
"He admired opera and Laurence Olivier's Hamlet, but he had no time for tragedy,--for the squalor of tragedy—in
ordinary life… Failures in life—failures of luck, of health, of finances—all struck
him as lapses and his resolute approval of me did not extend to my ramshackle
background." (Another reference here to the transformation of the ordinary
into the extraordinary by the artist.
What, actually does so-called real life have to do with art at all?)

Alfrida
tells the narrator that they would not let her in to see her mother at the
hospital, even though she yelled her head off.
Alfrida says, "You know what I said? I remember saying it. I said, But she would want to see me. She would want to see me." Alfrida laughs at herself scornfully,
adding. "I must've thought I was a
pretty big cheese, mustn't I? She would
want to see me."

The
narrators says she had never heard that part of the story before. But the
phrase Alfrida uses strikes an important chord for her. Here we have the most
important paragraph in the story:

And the minute I
heard it, something happened. It was as
if a trap had snapped shut, to hold these words in my head. I did not exactly understand what use I would
have for them. I only knew how they jolted me and released me, right away, to
breathe a different kind of air, available only to myself."

She says the story she later wrote with the
line, She would want to see me in it,
obviously caused a rift between her and Alfrida. When her father tells her
about Alfrida's being upset, she is surprised and angry that Alfrida's objects
to something that seemed to have so little to do with her. She tells her father it wasn't Alfrida at all,.
"I changed it. I wasn't even
thinking about her. It was a
character. Anybody could see that." (This is basic paradox of art for the artist—that
she is not really interested in "real life" at all, that what she
takes from real life is only raw material, coarse "stuff" that she
transforms into significance and meaning. )

She
thinks there is a danger when she is at home with her father. "It was the danger of seeing my life through
other eyes than my own, seeing it as an ever-increasing roll of words, like
barbed wire, intricate, bewildering, uncomforting—set against the rich productions
the food, flowers, and knitted garments, of other women's domesticity."
(And indeed, for the artist, it is the language that matters, not the stuff.)

At
her father's funeral, she meets Alfrida's daughter who Alfrida gave up for
adoption as a child. She tells her that Alfrida said she was smart but not as
smart as she thought she was. The
daughter says Alfrida saw the narrator as a kind of "cold fish."

The
story ends after the Sunday afternoon
dinner at Alfrida's as the narrator walks back alone to her rooming house. She is glad that the people around her are
people she did not know. "What a
blessing." She goes into a
drugstore for a cup of coffee and begins to feel happy to be alone. The story
ends with these lines:

"I did not
think of the story I would make about Alfrida, but of the work I wanted to do,
which seemed more like grabbing something out of the air than constructing
stories. The cries of the crowd came to
me like big heartbeats, full of sorrows.
Lovely formal-sounding waves, with their distant, almost inhuman assent
and lamentation. This was what I wanted,
this was what I thought I had to pay attention to, this was how I wanted my
life to be."

This
is a difficult conclusion for nonwriters to accept, for it suggests that the
writer is not interested in individual human people in the world, but rather
the "formal," the "inhuman." I will conclude these comments
by referring back to Joy Williams, who is better than her condescending remarks
about Munro would suggest, a writer who is as aware of the loneliness of the
writer's "cold fish" attitude toward reality than she might want to
admit. Joy Williams says, short story writers love the dark and are always
fumbling around in it. “The writer,” says Williams, doesn’t want to “disclose
or instruct of advocate, he wants to transmute and disturb. He cherishes the
mystery…. He wants to escape his time, the obligations of his time, and, by
writing, transcend them.”

Munro
knows there is something obsessive and inhuman about the writer. In one of her most
recent interviews, she said of her retirement, “There is a nice
feeling about being just like everyone else now. But it also means that the
most important thing in my life is gone."

I am going to shut up about Alice Munro for a
time on this blog, while I work on the essay on Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage I have promised Bob Thacker for a collection of essays he is editing. I will let you know when I think I have an
essay. In the meantime, let's take a
look at the forty stories in this year's O.
Henry Award Stories and Best American
Short Stories.

6 comments:

Anonymous
said...

I think the city that she went to visit Alfrida in was Toronto (she mentions being south of Dundas St, east of Adelaide St) -- her fiance is away in Ottawa, remember -- and it's not clear that Alfrida did ask to bring a friend to the narrator's parents' house (or just assumed she couldn't).

I also wondered at the end what exactly the narrator had missed about the relationship between Alfrida and her father, hinted at elsewhere (beyond her misinterpretation of the childhood story that opens this short story, that is).

Thanks for the note about the city being Toronto rather than Ottawa. I guess I thought it was Ottawa because I was just visiting the university in that city. And I did not think there was any special relationship between Alfrida and the father, except a kind of "meeting of the minds," as it were. What do you suspect?

I actually thought the city that she went to visit Alfrida in was London, ON. "East of Adelaide" is a well known term in London, and the description of houses in that part of town could well describe the area of London that is south of Dundas and East of Adelaide. I also often picture many of the rural Ontario towns that Ms. Munro writes about are likely in South Western Ontario, considering she grew up in Wingham. So if the narrator was travelling 60 miles from somewhere near Wingham, London would be a good guess.

I also wondered about a sexual relationship between Alfrida and the father.

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About Me

Born and raised in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky. Received B.A. from Morehead State University in 1963; M.A. from Ohio University in 1964; Ph.D. from Ohio University in 1966. Taught at California State University, Long Beach from 1967 to 2007. Retired and currently writing and blogging.

Dubliners Centenial

One hundred years ago, the great collection of stories Dubliners by James Joyce appeared. If you are interested in my comments on that collection, see my posts in April 2012 when the book was featured in Dublin's "One City, One Book."